China's latest holiday travel boom was about more than ticking attractions off a list. During the week-long National Day break, travelers took longer trips, explored lesser-known destinations and made time for experiences that once might have seemed too time-consuming.

More than 2.1 billion cross-regional trips were made across China during the holiday, up 0.7% from a year earlier. Rail travel remained particularly busy, with passenger trips exceeding 20 million a day for three consecutive days.

New trains open up new destinations

Four new high-speed rail services opened around the holiday, including the Xiong'an-Shangqiu section of the Beijing-Hong Kong high speed railway and the Harbin-Yichun section, making it easier for travelers to reach diverse cultural and natural destinations.

For the Harbin-Yichun section, known as China's northernmost high-speed railway, the holiday marked its first major travel rush since opening.

"The scenery along the Hayi line is beautiful. I can now make a weekend round trip just to see the autumn colors," a traveler from Beijing said.

The new connection has already brought more visitors to Yichun, a forested city in northeast China's Heilongjiang Province. From October 1 to 3, its A-rated tourist attractions received 21.5% more visitors than a year earlier. Some of the city's best-known spots, including the Tangwang River forest and stone landscape and the Wuying Korean pine forest, each drew more than 10,000 visitors a day.

History becomes part of the holiday experience

The 90th anniversary of the Red Army's Long March victory also put China's revolutionary history in the spotlight during the holiday.

In Ruijin, east China's Jiangxi Province, tourist attractions welcomed more than 950,000 visitors in the first six days of the break. At the Red Well, a site associated with the history of the revolutionary period, visitors continued to line up despite rainy weather, with queues stretching up to 200 meters.

At the Ruijin Ruijing Grand Theater, audiences filled the seats for "Ruijin Ruijing," a stage production that revisits the history of the Central Soviet Area. The show offers visitors a more immersive way to engage with the city's revolutionary past.

The road trip remains a favorite

Road travel was another major feature of the holiday, with more than 1.96 billion trips made by road, while traffic from new energy vehicles jumped 35% from a year earlier.

Despite the surge in road travel, the number of seriously congested sections of expressways longer than 10 kilometers fell 70% nationwide. Car rentals also picked up, with the average daily rental rate rising 25% year on year.

In Huizhou, Guangdong Province, a 218-kilometer scenic highway linking Mount Nankun and Mount Luofu became a popular destination for road trippers from across the the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

The route runs through Boluo and Longmen counties, passing reservoirs, old banyan trees and scenic rest stops along the way. Nearby hotels and homestays sold out early, while restaurants saw long lines during peak hours.

Travelers are staying longer and doing more

The biggest shift, however, may be in how people are spending their time once they arrive.

Data from travel platform Fliggy showed that bookings for glacier trekking during the National Day holiday period rose more than 50% from a year earlier. Skydiving bookings climbed nearly 80%, while whale-watching trips more than tripled.

Activities that require extra planning, such as glacier trekking and whale watching, were once easy to leave off a packed itinerary. Now, they are increasingly becoming the reason for the trip itself.

Travel platform Tongcheng Travel found that bookings for tourism products in county-level destinations rose 42% year on year. Travelers also stayed an average of 3.2 days longer in counties than during the same period last year.

The shift suggests that Chinese travelers are becoming more willing to slow down and spend more time in a place, rather than rushing through a checklist of attractions, according to Jing Daily, an online business information aggregator. For many, the holiday is becoming less about seeing everything and more about actually experiencing somewhere.